Akamai Reports: we’ve a long way to go to the top ten!

The Akamai quarterly reports have come out this week. I always think that they are a good gauge of how Minnesota is doing with broadband speed and deployment because I feel like the folks doing the reporting are pretty far removed from any Minnesota stakeholders – and it’s global comparison. As you may recall, the Minnesota Broadband Bill pushes us to compare our state’s broadband access and penetration to other states and counties:

It is a goal of the state that by 2015 and thereafter, the state be in:

(1) the top five states of the United States for broadband speed universally accessible to residents and businesses;
(2) the top five states for broadband access; and
(3) the top 15 when compared to countries globally for broadband penetration.

So here are some of the global highlights:

Broadband General Stats:

3.4% increase (from the first quarter of 2011) globally in the number of unique IPv4 addresses connecting to Akamai’s network, growing to over 604 million.

The global average connection speed was 2.6 Mbps, and the global average peak connection speed was 11.4 Mbps.

High broadband (>5 Mbps) adoption grew to 27% in the second quarter

Broadband (>2 Mbps) adoption increased to 65% globally

Mobile General Stats:

Average connection speeds on known mobile providers ranged from 5.3 Mbps down to 209 kbps.

Average peak connection speeds ranged from 23.4 Mbps down to 1.2 Mbps

Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, the Netherlands are all doing well. The US is not doing that well as demonstrated by the charts below.

Minnesota is also not rocking it – as the following charts demonstrate:

Minnesota was mentioned as the stats with the lowest growth of peak speed – but that’s better than the 7 states that didn’t see a growth in peak speed. I think I would feel less discouraged by these stats if Minnesota had not made a couple of these top ten rankings in the 2010 Q3 report, when we were #10 for average connection speed and St Paul was #7 for average connection speed by city.

There is a new feature to the Akamai reports that allows us to track progress in Minnesota over the last couple years (from 2007 Q3 to current 2011 Q2):